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Comment by aw1621107 | Hacker News Reader

After digging a bit more, I found a comment from a Discord engineer that seems to clear things up [0]:

> Another Discord engineer chiming in here. I worked on trying to fix these spikes on the Go service for a couple weeks. We did indeed try moving up the latest Go at the time (1.10) but this had no effect.

So I guess that means that there's a reasonable chance that they didn't see a fix on the horizon.

That being said, I have no idea if work to fix this issue was visible on Go's Github, so maybe the Discord engineers were unaware of said work or were unhappy with the pace of progress.

Kind of miffed at myself for missing that comment, since it directly addresses my question, but at least it's answered now.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eyuebc/why_dis...

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Based on reading through various posts from Discord people after that blog was posted, my understanding was there was a material gap in time between the last time they tried in earnest to solve the latency issue with Go (with Go 1.10, as in your quote) vs. when they later did the re-write in Rust.

It seems during that gap in time, the Go runtime team happened to solve their problem, which was GA in Go 1.12 in Feb 2019, which was prior to them doing the re-write in Rust, at least as far as I was able to follow.

One imprecise quote on timing of the re-write: [1]

This blog post perhaps is a bit "after the fact" we had made the switch over mid 2019

It's not crazy for someone to put aside a problem for a while, and then upon returning to the problem some time later decide to go a different route without re-exploring prior solutions, if that is what happened.

All that said, I might have misunderstood the timing, and I'm trying to avoid going back over all the various forums they commented in to find a better quote on timing ;-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239707

I think it comes down to what "we had made the switch over mid 2019" is supposed to mean. I had interpreted that as being the time the Rust implementation was put into production and the Go implementation retired, with the rewrite starting some time before then, but I don't really have any strong evidence to support that interpretation (and that interpretation doesn't say anything about the actual point at which the rewrite decision was made).

The situation you describe is certainly plausible, though. Shame that the chances of finding out what actually happened are quite low at this point.

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